Every once in a while, the hostility to intellectualism that is prevalent among certain sections of the wider public sneaks up behind you and smashes you over the head. As I watched FOX’s interview with Reza Aslan (no, not that Aslan), a scholar of religious sociology, I realized that not only was this one of those times, it was, perhaps, among the very worst of those times. In this instance, I was not merely being smashed over the head, I was being smashed over the head with something spiky.
Tag: Islam
Evaluating Erdogan
Recently there have been demonstrations against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The demonstrations began because the government was intending to demolish a park in Istanbul (not Constantinople) and replace it with a shopping mall. This relatively pedestrian protest escalated when the Turkish government removed the protesters in a violent police raid. The target of the protests has now expanded from the park to the policies of Erdogan more broadly, specifically the social conservatism of his government and its tendency to give preference to Islam in its legislation. A lot of people in the media in developed states have begun referring to this as a “Turkish Spring”, and the default reaction has been to support the protesters, assuming that they are under governments similar to those that prevailed in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and other such places. The instinct is to view Turkey as just another Middle Eastern country protesting a generically malevolent government. A poor job has been done of evaluating the Turkish situation specifically, of giving the Erdogan government a fair evaluation. Today, I’d like to contribute to rectifying that.
Islam and Terrorism
The other day, there was a terrorist attack in Woolwich, London. Lee Rigby, a drummer in the army, was attacked and stabbed by two assailants. This has brought up the subjection of the relationship between Islam and terrorism. It has also raised the question of whether or not permitting Muslim immigration leads to terrorism. Today, I’ve decided to weigh in on the whole mess.
What if God Exists?
When confronted with right wing social conservatism, the left usually adopts one of two strategies. On the one hand, it can argue for tolerance of differing viewpoints, but this argument is only persuasive for those who themselves are not so certain of what they believe as to legislate it. In other words, the tolerance argument only works for people who were already susceptible to accept social progressivism. Alternatively, the left sometimes approaches this problem by rejecting the existence of god so as to undermine the foundation of the conservative belief system, but in order for social conservatives to exist in the first place, their level of confidence in their belief in a god must be very high. These arguments, in many cases, are doomed to fail. So what else can the left argue? Well perhaps the left can seek common ground with the right by accepting, for the purposes of argument, the existence of god.
France Goes to War
French President François Hollande has decided that France is going into Mali. The nation of Mali has, in the last year, descended into civil war. The war in Mali has received relatively little mainstream media coverage and many westerners are, to our collective shame, unaware of what has been going on there and the role their own governments have played in creating the war. Today I would like to examine the Malian Civil War, its causes, the present state of affairs, and the ethics of intervening in it.
Benjamin Studebaker 
